Societal tastes and styles are in constant flux. The same holds true for the appeal of hotel furniture. As the years slip into the ether, the way people use and interact with furniture changes. And because FF&E is such a critical component to guest experience, hoteliers must keep those expensive case goods relevant. That can be a seriously expensive proposition.

Fortunately, companies like The Refinishing Touch specialize in reimagining furniture in ways that reinvents pieces to make them more functional, durable and unique. Here’s some creative ways to keep furniture fresh.

Vanquish that Armoire

If your hotel still has bulky and unseemly armoires in guestrooms there’s no excuse to keep them any longer. Early on, The Refinishing Touch championed ways to convert armoires so quickly and easily, rooms are put back in service the very same day. We’ll remove the top section, refinish and add a stone or glass top to complete the new look.

Select a New Style

Sometimes pieces need to be reconfigured; sometimes they need to be entirely reinvented. The Refinishing Touch has myriad solutions enabling us to create factory fresh looking pieces by changing color, adding stone, laminate or glass elements, and changing the hardware, to name a few options.

Add Technology

Today’s new furniture includes more technology, such as LED lighting, data ports, USB charging stations and concealed outlets. Rather than buy all new furniture, more hoteliers are finding they can reengineer and refinish their existing furniture to add those critical bits of technology that have become standard guest requests.

FF&E Fast Fix

Perhaps your existing pieces have a design flaw that was initially overlooked. One example, a chair was improperly engineered for a major hotel. It constantly hit the edge of the desk, damaging an expensive looking piece of furniture resulting in negative guest experiences. The Refinishing Touch engineered an inexpensive solution with high quality result, eliminating the problem resulting in a crisp, clean look.

Before you renovate and dispose of ‘outdated’ furniture, remember I can be reinvented and brought to like new condition saving you up to 80% compared to buying new.

We made our annual pilgrimage to Las Vegas to attend HD Expo. This year, thousands of attendees descended on Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino to meet more than 800 hospitality FF&E and OS&E suppliers during three days on and off the show floor. During the event, we met with lots of people to discuss the latest trends in hospitality, and to assess how the design community is feeling about the state of the hotel industry. Here’s what we learned:

We’re too Busy!

One major problems owners are facing is the lack of available design professionals to do their projects. With a massive number of hotels either being renovated or built, designers are over worked, over stressed, and just plain over it. Not that they’d prefer to go back to sad and scary days of 2008 anytime soon. However, this problem is causing owners and operators numerous headaches as they’re forced to pay more for projects, or suffer long delays to completion time, or both.

Steve Wynn is Still the Man

Nearly 30 years after reinventing the Las Vegas casino concept with The Mirage, he’s still searching to create the perfect casino project, which he hopes to achieve with the under construction Wynn Boston Harbor project. During a keynote discussion during HD Expo, Steve Wynn and his design partner of 37 years, Roger Thomas, revealed the secret to consistently creating memorable designs. “We first ask what is the statement we want to make when the visitor is out front, then we design to emotion and not materials. We don’t care if it’s onyx or marble because we do not design to budget. We design to how it feels” said Wynn.

Bio-What?

We learned a new term; Biophilia. It’s not a dirty one, though we think it should be. Biophilia refers to humankind’s innate desire to connect with the natural environment. It’s an understanding changing the way hotels, and other structures, are designed.

“It’s the idea of what happens when we connect people with nature as an economic driver,” said Joshua Radoff, Co-Founder & Principal, LEED AP BD+C, YR&G, a sustainability focused consultancy.

The concept is informing design with new environmental standards, such as the ones adopted by the LEED certification program, as well as through the inclusion of nature first elements such as water features and green walls. These elements lead to higher customer satisfaction and increased profitability.

Sustainability is Always in Style

More and more, we’re seeing hotel companies take a conscientious approach to sustainability. FF&E purchasing pros regularly look at the entire manufacturing process now when determining the viability of a product. And more frequently, they’re eschewing buying new in favor of refinishing or reengineering existing furniture pieces. The move keeps tons of material from taking up valuable room in landfills, while also saving hoteliers up to 80% when compared to buying new. It’s the smart way to save without being stingy on guest experience.

For more information on The Refinishing Touch and how we help designers reimagine spaces by reinventing their furnishings, contact us at: (800) 523-9448 or via email at sales@therefinishingtouch.com.

Whether you are talking about furniture assets in hotel rooms, dorm rooms, military barracks or government administration buildings, there is a strong and undeniable argument for asset recycling.

“Asset recycling is a concept that basically speaks to leveraging the existing investments that taxpayers have in public assets. It tries to find a way to make them perform better and drive more value from that past investment,” explains Michael Fenn.

And that’s exactly what it is. Asset recycling is not just about protecting existing assets; it’s about leveraging existing assets. It offers numerous benefits, although all too often its supporters claim a single one. So we thought we would share the multiple benefits we see day-in, day-out from asset management best practices:

It’s sustainable, and adds to ‘green’ credentials. In the four decades that we’ve been advising and delivering furniture asset management best practices, the need for government organizations and commercial businesses to demonstrate sustainability and to share their green credentials has certainly grown. Asset management is an undeniably sustainable practice: it slashes carbon emissions, reduces landfill waste and decreases consumption of new resources.

It drives stakeholder value. As existing assets are leveraged through recycling, re-use or remanufacturing, more value is delivered to stakeholders. This includes shareholders, taxpayers, citizens, travelers or students.

Budgets are saved. Government organizations and higher education are under budget pressure. Hotels are constantly looking for ways to reduce spend while maintaining standards. Across the board businesses and institutions need to protect the bottom line. We repeatedly see up to eighty percent of budgets saved through furniture asset management best practices.

Budgets can be re-allocated. This applies to each industry that we work with, including government, education and hospitality. The stress of prioritizing tight budgets is a headache for any general, facility or resources manager. Being able to save budget and spend it in areas that deliver greater returns, competitive differentiators and benefits to citizens, users or customers, is a sound business decision.

Want to find out more about the returns your organization could reap from furniture asset management? Then please contact us today: marketing@therefinishingtouch.com.

In a recent post we discussed one of the cornerstones of furniture asset management; inventory management. At The Refinishing Touch we not only provide refinishing, remanufacturing and re-upholstery services, we also help our customers to manage and track those furnishings and fixtures as capital assets, using web-based asset management tools.

When TRT was founded back in 1977, we became known for providing environmentally-safe furniture refinishing services, but times have changed considerably. Today our business is about managing assets, helping our customers to manage expenditure and their business continuity needs.

What makes us different isn’t just the longevity of our materials and finishes. It’s our ability to work on-site, to ensure our customers stay open and productive. The industries in which we work: hospitality, education and government, have little tolerance for downtime and rooms cannot be out of use for days or weeks. Furniture is a vital part of these operations, and it needs refinishing, re-upholstery or remanufacturing because the organization is busy and successful. Creating downtime therefore has a direct calculable dollar cost. If a hotel, public sector organization, or educational facility has rooms of action it causes problems,so we work safely and responsibly onsite.

Our onsite approach is efficient in terms of both cost and carbon. We know that the alternative, transporting furniture offsite, is a waste of time, money and carbon dioxide. We are able to work onsite when many large refinishing companies cannot. This comes as a result of four decades of experience doing just that. We know better than anyone how to minimize disruption, move seamlessly from room to room, and how to ensure that those rooms are back in operation quickly.

Using non-toxic processes are also crucial in working onsite. We don’t use solvents in our processes and our non-toxic lacquers don’t contain dangerous Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs). They are hypoallergenic, safe and clean, because we understand how important it is to use safe, responsible products.

Our approach to furniture asset management certainly guarantees indoor air quality and safety. But in business terms, it means quicker processes, lower labor costs and a quicker turnaround on refinished rooms for everybody involved.

In previous posts we have shared our views on furniture asset management as environmental and fiscally responsible behavior. We discussed the need to maximize opportunities to reuse resources, minimize waste, and to take stock and understand the value of current furniture assets.

Which brings us to one of the cornerstones of furniture asset management; inventory management. We help our customers to gain visibility and to track furnishings, fixtures and equipment as capital assets with our Global Furniture Asset Management, or GFAM, web-based asset management tool. If you’d like to hear more about this, please contact our team.

Whichever system you use, it’s important to ensure that someone takes ownership of furniture inventory management. We typically find that this is managed by facilities management teams, but it’s important that the ownership is supported and encouraged by general management and also by finance. Furniture is a considerable investment for any college, hotel or government organization, and it’s important that it is tracked.

Establishing an inventory management system for furniture starts with an active database. Note the highlight on the word active. We talk to many organizations keen to discuss how much they can save through furniture asset management that have outdated or non-existent databases of existing furniture assets. They aren’t sure what furniture they have, where it is or what condition it is in. The old adage ‘you can’t manage what you can’t measure’ is certainly true in furniture asset management.

One obvious challenge of managing furniture is the ease with which pieces can be reconfigured and moved. This means it is important to track them and to have someone with an assigned responsibility to keep the database updated. Audits are essential. If your organization doesn’t have an updated database of its furniture, then you need to do a furniture audit. Map out, room-by-room and building-by-building, the furniture assets you have, where they are, what they are and their condition. Best practice involves associating the date and cost of acquisition, a practice which your finance team will appreciate. It shows how best furniture asset management practices such as refinishing, re-upholstery and remanufacturing can save up to 80 percent of budgets.

When tracking furniture we consider location, condition and evaluation of existing assets as three key criteria that need to be consistently tracked. There’s no need to have a complicated system as this is about simple quality control measures that will determine where money has been spent, where it can be saved and how budgets can be protected.

Finally, it’s important to consider the furniture asset management best practice of buying high-quality furniture in the first place. Increasingly we find that clients turn to us before they make new purchasing decisions, to ask us for our opinions of which product they should buy; which materials, which finish. We understand the importance of helping our clients to make a best value decision at the moment of purchase, to give then long-term investment protection.

For more details of how we approach inventory management in the real world or to hear about our Global Furniture Asset Management (GFAM) tool, please contact us atmarketing@thefinishingtouch.com.

Government is a market we know very well. For over 37 years our government client base has comprised local and federal government and agencies – including the Executive Office of the President, U.S. Congress, the U.S. Department of Justice, the U.S. Department of Defense, the U.S. Army, the U.S. Navy, and the U.S. Coastguard. We have applied the best practices of furniture asset management across these organizations including on-site refinishing, re-upholstery and remanufacturing at administrative buildings, offices, barracks, and housing facilities.

The U.S. Government continues to demonstrate a commitment to green and sustainable activities. In the past week the President signed an Executive Order for federal government to cut greenhouse emissions by 40 percent over the next decade compared to 2008 levels, and to increase the use of renewable energy by 30 percent.

In the announcement the federal government emphasized the executive order’s dual benefits. First the financial benefits, with the press release stating that the new initiatives will save taxpayers up to $18 billion in energy costs. Then the green benefits, with the saving an estimated 26 million metric tons of greenhouse gases – equivalent to taking 5.5 million cars off the road for a year.

We know that whether we are working with government organizations, or with hotels or college campuses, that the dual returns of financial and green benefits is a winner. This is why furniture asset management is a winning strategy. As a General Services Administration (GSA)-certified contractor we have refinished, reupholstered and remanufactured tens of thousands furniture and fittings, and shown hundreds of government organizations how to save on budgets, protect assets and reduce environmental impact. This is why we are asked to share our views with the government press, are trusted by all levels of government, and why we were awarded the Evergreen Award by the GSA.

We’ve previously calculated that the federal government, with its 500,000 buildings, could save more than $714 million through the broad and well-structured application of furniture asset management best practices and cut carbon dioxide emissions by a factor of a hundred.

For the government this isn’t just about best financial practices and demonstrable sustainability – it’s also about public accountability, leadership and setting a good example.

At 8:30pm local time on March 28, lights and electronics were switched off across the globe as part of Earth Hour 2015.

The first Earth Hour was held in 2007 in Sydney, Australia. It is now a global phenomenon, and an open declaration of the global desire to reverse the impact of climate change. Participants switch off electricity to show that they care about the planet, with their efforts echoed by the darkening of famous landmarks such as New York’s Empire State Building, and Big Ben and Buckingham Palace in London.

Earth Hour is organized by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), one of the largest and most respected conservation groups in the world. This year’s event was the largest to date, with hundreds of millions of individuals taking part, spanning 24 time zones, six continents and 172 countries. And it’s not just individuals that take part. Each year more companies, associations and government bodies join in to demonstrate their commitment to sustainability.

As expected, this year’s Earth Hour included activities by a number of brands and businesses that we are proud to work with:

Wyndham Worldwide, which has won a number of awards and accolades for its commitment to sustainability, participated for the sixth year in a row. Lights were turned off or dimmed, and a number of hotels planned Earth Hour events including many holding candlelit dinners

Hilton Worldwide joined in for its fifth Earth Hour, allowing its 12 brands and 4,300-plus properties to get creative. As well as switching off or dimming lights and neon signs, it also held candlelit dinners with low carbon menus, sustainable cocktails, and even organized candle-making for guests

Events like Earth Hour must be applauded for helping to encourage individuals and brands to recognize environmental change. And yet we are also proud to witness the day-to-day commitment of hotels brands such as Hilton, Marriott and Wyndham as they embrace long-term environmental practices such as furniture asset management. After all, there’s little point in any brand switching off the lights for an hour if they continue to buy lower quality, throw-away furniture destined for landfill, unnecessarily multiplying their carbon footprints by a hundred-fold. Sustainable practices pay more respect to the trees that have been cut down to make the furniture we all use day-to-day.

So we look forward to the next Earth Day on March 19, 2016. But for the 51 weeks in between, we will continue to urge all businesses to embed sustainability in day-to-day best practices.

As well as our award-winning furniture asset management services, we provide the materials required to take each project to completion. This includes our exclusive hardware collection so we can seamlessly – and beautifully – take refinishing and refurbishment projects from beginning to end. The hardware line was launched in response to our refinishing clients repeatedly asking our teams for hardware recommendations that would match our level of services and give them a choice of furniture features ranging from the traditional to modern – whether it be dresser handles, drawer slides, knobs, pulls or casters, and it’s been a great success.

Refinishing is a fiscally and environmentally responsible activity that produces striking results – as just glimpses of some of our work at Georgetown University, The DoubleTree by Hilton in Denver-Aurora, and The Candlewood Suites in Killeen,Texas.

As well as this sense of responsibility, each of our customers, whether they are hoteliers, college administrators or government officials strive for the high level of attention to detail. This level of detail is where hardware plays its part, giving our refinishing, re-upholstery and re-purposing customers the types, styles and finishes that are the perfect complement to their recently revitalized furniture – at a fraction of the cost to purchasing externally.
The Refinishing Touch hardware: Crowne Plaza San Antonio

The photographs shown, of past projects with the Boston Hyatt Hotel and the Crowne Plaza San Antonio, depict the impressive before and after visuals of our refinishing work – complete with The Refinishing Touch hardware.

What do you think of the White House’s new solar panels that were unveiled last month?

“Better late than never,” was the comment from climate activist Bill McKibben in response to of the newly-installed solar panels on one of the country’s most iconic buildings. ABC News stated, “White House finally gets solar panels” and hundreds, if not thousands, of other media outlets reported on the on-off history of roof-top solar panels at the White House, which had been installed in the late 1970s by President Carter and removed in 1986 when building works were being undertaken for President Regan.

President Obama made the pledge to add the panels way back in October 2010. The pledge reflected the Government’s green commitment, including its support of renewable energy at that time, a stance which President Obama has reinforced as the globe faces climate changes, rising sea levels and unpredictable weather patterns. Today the Obama Administration is still committed to reducing America’s greenhouse gas emissions by 17 percent by 2019 (from 2005 levels), and increasing renewable energy, increasing energy efficiency and generally securing America’s energy future.

Having once worked with the White House ourselves, The Refinishing Touch is pleased to see the same ethics behind the sustainable practices we performed inside being brought to the light – literally – with the reinstallation of solar and its photovoltaic technology.

Whether it’s a historic government edifice, a college dormitory in need of an update, or a hotel looking to increase décor, maintain brand guidelines and increase guest retention – every building has a sustainable option when it comes to updating look, facilities and furniture. Whether its solar technology, recycling programs, or furniture asset management, there are ways to create environmental benefits alongside budget gains and design payback.

By incorporating the three R’s – reduce, reuse, recycle – into our business plan from day one and encouraging our clients to do the same, we have been fortunate to assist decision makers and environmental activists in greening US buildings since 1977.

Recently, Inside Higher Ed showcased a piece from a collegiate administrator, G. Rendell, pushing for a more sustainable balance on his campus, and throughout the world. The piece, entitled Sustainability commandment #3, discusses the complex idea of a sustainable economy.

As professionals helping on-campus facility managers achieve sustainable renovations, we understand the difficulty of defining objectives, setting goals and communicating processes to everybody involved. Creating a sustainable economy, whether it is across campus, across multiple locations, or even worldwide, is difficult.

Rendell cites the third sustainable commandment as: “The economy exists to serve society, not the other way around. Thus, maintain an economy which is sufficient to provide the goods and services required to support happy, healthy living for all members of society. And do it in such a manner that the resources consumed by economic activity don’t exceed the levels which the planet can supply indefinitely.

It’s an important message, and one that all industries should keep in mind. It’s important to remain successful in your business, but it is imperative to do so without taking more than you can give back to the environment.

Many higher education organizations continue to set an exemplary example for businesses and to other industries. They do this by fostering youth to be educated and empowered on the subject of eco-awareness, and to introduce sustainable initiatives within their own organizations.

A sustainable economy is a challenge, but one that is accomplished by the hard work of many college professionals, students and the greater green community.